The port of the OpenSolaris kernel to the PowerPC architecture ('Polaris') is now complete. As stated on the Blastware website: "Ladies and Gentlemen, The OpenSolaris kernel for PowerPC has been built." One of the bigger hurdles to having a full-fledged port of OpenSolaris running on your PPC hardware has now been taken.

Being a Linux kernel hacker among other OS kernels that I hack on for a living, I was tempted to look at Solaris. I am afraid of tainting myself as far as Linux kernel contributions. Anyone have to comments to this effect of what the license says about this?

How could looking at Solaris taint you? It's an OS, not mercury or radiation. Solaris is a wonderful UNIX platform and there are good paying Solaris jobs out there.

Evaluate it and see if you like it. I suggest that if you are using x86 hardware then you try Solaris Express first.

Correct me if I'm mistaken but I believe the Solaris distributions go like this:

Solaris=stable and conservative but slower to adopt new technologies
Solaris Express=stable but more bleeding edge than Solaris
OpenSolairs=bleeding edge with possibile stability issues (primarily for developmental and testing platform, not for production)

It's tainting in the way looking at some code, which sticks to your brain, and cannot be erased from your mind - leading to possible problems when working on other projects with licenses incompatible with the license from the former project *doh*

Code is not like trade secrets. I am not a lawyer; however based upon my personal studies on this particular topic, the general consensus seems to be that the knowledge you happen to maintain in your head from study of existing works -- excluding patented methods or trade secrets -- is usually perfectly ok to use in your own work. For example, I'm fairly certain the Free Software Foundation has made it very clear that they don't consider a person's knowledge obtained from reading GPL code to have any effect on a person's other work.

Really, if you're concerned about the knoweldge you gain from studying software code -- as legal experts call it, "negative knowledge" -- you should speak with legal counsel.

This means that this excellent OS will now run on 4 platforms: x86 32, x86 64 (is it called AMD64?), Sparc and now PowerPC.

Question: how long is the step from this to having it run on the POWER architecture? For such an os as Solaris, that would be more fitting - Solaris needs more than just 1 or 2 CPUs to really stretch it's legs!

The idea is to proceed in a careful and stepwise manner that allows us to arrive at a very stable kernel for the small server/workstation ( Genesi ODW ) or embedded device. The next step will be to review the memory manager and HAT layer to address the larger SMP servers. It is only reasonable at the time to say that genunix has been built for the PowerPC target and there are now many more steps to take.

This is great progress but there is still a long way to go. Just because genunix has compiled and linked doesn't mean it will run. You also don't have many of the required kernel subsystems in there, no networking no disk access no dtrace no dev/random etc etc.

It is a great milestone but to say the kernel port has been done is very missleading - at least until it has booted!